Born in Hamburg in 1903, Herbert List began taking photographs in 1930 and left his father's coffee company and Nazi Germany in 1936 to become a photographer. He endeavored to capture not just what was seen but also what was imagined in a particular place, in a somewhat surreal yet influential style he dubbed fotografia metafisica. List's lifelong affinity for Italy and the Mediterranean resulted in a photographic mosaic of past and present—a haunting mixture of people, places, and dramatically staged compositions, often with subtly or openly homoerotic themes—and he also produced a number of evocative portraits. This striking monograph surveys all four decades of List's photographic career in hundreds of black and white images.